2016 Great Basin National Park Astronomy Festival

 It's that time of year again--Astronomy Festival! This is the seventh annual event at Great Basin National Park, going from Thursday, September 29 through Saturday, October 1. After school on Thursday we drove up to the park and visited the solar bracelet table. The solar beads turn color when they're out in the sun. We also picked up a copy of the new Junior Ranger Night Explorer booklet. It looks like lots of fun!

Desert Girl shows off her bracelet. And her new haircut!


Then we went to a talk about how to use planispheres. We all learned something new.

The sun peeked out from the clouds, so we used the solar viewing glasses to take a look.

 Then the kids got distracted by picking up and eating pine nuts. They sure are tasty!

Ranger Steve brought out the solar telescope, and we checked out some prominences (little protrusions) coming off the sun. I learned that the sun has big magnetic fields that influence where these prominences occur. (I hope I got that right. I always feel so humbled when learning about astronomy, there's just so much information out there, not to mention the overwhelming scope of how big the universe is!)

We returned in the evening for the ranger talent show. It's always a lot of fun, and I volunteereed to play my trumpet. I thought the theme to the classic Star Trek movie would be a fun song to play. I didn't get a photo of myself, but here are some of the other performers. First up, the Front Porch Pickers, who generally play every Friday night on---are you ready for this??---the front porch!

We heard beautiful singing...

...great guitar playing...

...the kids' rendition of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star...

...the Drinking Gourd song...

...a song in French...

...more great guitar playing...

...and some excellent keyboarding.

Then it was time to head down to the picnic area to look through the telescopes. About ten big telescopes were set up, checking out globular clusters M13 (in Hercules) and M22 (in Sagittarius), a binary star system, the rings of Saturn, the Ring Nebula, and more. 

I overheard someone asking what the Milky Way was, as he had never seen "that cloudy thing" up in the sky. It made me realize how much we take our night skies for granted, living way out in the boonies. Only a couple hundred years ago, everyone saw night skies like this, but in the last couple centuries, light pollution has made it so that people in cities or near cities can't see the wonders beyond our little orb. You'd think we, as intelligent beings, would be able to fix this quickly.

The kids were eager to earn their Milky Way candy bars for looking through telescopes and learning more about the night sky. It was a school night, so we couldn't stay too long. The festival goes on for two more days, with lots of events!